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As promised in the more libertarian socialist countries thread, here is my first timeline. It's not the one I thought I'd tell, but it's a good one nonetheless.

Chp. 1: From Rhetoric to Revolution




In the immediate aftermath of the death of Stalin, throughout the Eastern Bloc there were numerous protest movements, buoyed by Khruschev's public denunciation of Stalin in the "Secret Speech", seeking to reform the Eastern Bloc in order to ensure basic levels of human rights, freedoms, and decency for all citizens. Of these, the most successful was that of Poland, whose protests throughout the summer of 1956 managed to ensure that Bierut would be succeeded by (relative) moderate Gomulka.




Hungary, meanwhile had throughout most of the time since the Red Army liberated Hungary been ruled by Matyas Rakosi, who for the past three years had shared power with his Prime Minister, the popular Imre Nagy, whose "New Course" for Hungary's failing economy included the scaling back of political repression and forced collectivisation in favour of a less totalitarian state, that while still unmistakably Socialist, would imitate some Western democratic ideas in order to render the state somewhat functional. Alas, in 1955, he was deposed (and expelled from the Party) in favour of Rakosi's direct rule. Styling himself "Stalin's greatest disciple", (and thus abjectly failing to take note of the winds of change blowing through the Bloc) Rakosi promptly engaged in forcible re-collectivisation and attempted to solidify his increasingly untenable position with good old Stalinist oppression. As you can expect, anyone who wasn't a Rakosi loyalist took to this turn of events rather poorly. Newspapers (meant to be a source of pro-regime propaganda) started to openly criticise Rakosi, as the vast majority of the intelligentsia (and proletariat for that matter) began to to demand Nagy's reinstatement. This faction of the party began to form the Petofi Circle and began to openly protest. They managed to get Rakosi to be forcibly resigned "on health grounds" by the Politburo in July, only to be replaced by Erno Gero, his equally Stalinist 2nd-in-command.




These protests came to a head on the 20th October, when students from the Technical University, closely affiliated with the Petofi Circle released a manifesto of 19 demands. Chief among these was the reinstatment of Nagy not just to the Party, but to the premiership. That night, Gero retaliated by placing Nagy under house arrest for "Political Action Contrary to the Revolution". Ironically, said act led to directly to the beginning of one [1].




At 15;27, Sunday October 21st, a crowd of 15,000 students peacefully protesting the arrest trough central Budapest were met with open fire led by the AVH (Hungary's secret police) and the Army. By the time the protest had dispersed thirteen minutes later, 27 had been killed. This act, which later came to be known as Bloody Sunday, inspired a second wave of protests the very next day. This protest, the first to feature the "hole in flag" design that came to symbolise the Revolution, numbered 86,000 and succeeded in shutting down the city centre as well as taking over the main radio building, using it to broadcast their manifesto, as well as spread knowledge of the protests and the massacre across Hungary. In response, by 06;00 the next morning, Gero ordered the execution of Nagy, an act carried out sometime before the 25th.




In response to this call to action, many protestors set about creating their own Workers' Councils and Labour Unions independent of Party apparatus over the next week, with the revolutionaries seizing control of most of the North and East, and by the 25th they managed to set up a temporary government in Debrecen (Budapest still being the scene of brutal fighting), declaring the Co-operative Republic with Nagy serving as President in absentia, and that the new state would continue to be Socialist, albeit with a full commitment to human rights, and the authority of the Regional Councils and Unions, which would send representatives to, and abide by the decisions of the Debrecen Soviet. Seeking to demoralise the revolutionaries, the Gero administration publicly announced Nagy's death, complete with a photo of his bullet-riddled corpse. This had the opposite effect, as Hungarians now sought to avenge their fallen leader, with the widespread anger over this murder fueling the Councils, allowing them to seize control of Budapest on the 30th, moving their capital there on the 1st November, and managing to get the Gero administration to flee to Romania by the night of the 3rd. All told, about 24,000 people were killed during the uprising, the vast majority of them Revolutionary-aligned civilians, and a further 1,700 suspected AVH members killed in sporadic and uncoordinated reprisals in the weeks following the seizure of power.




Thus, the co-operative was born, and about to pose one hell of a problem to the Politburo.




[1] The POD; in OTL, Nagy was let back into the party on the 10th Oct, the manifesto contained only 16 points, and came two days later than TTL.
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